


the water can't drown me, i'm done with my dying

by girlwiththeradishearrings



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 00:03:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1877529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlwiththeradishearrings/pseuds/girlwiththeradishearrings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Sansa becomes a ceasefire for the war and is returned to Robb at Riverrun, but she isn't how they remembered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the water can't drown me, i'm done with my dying

The morning is brisk and dew coats the ground. Light is fractured upon storm clouds and Cat knows they will see rain before the hour is up. Shades of grey swell and burrow into each other, spanning across the sky, eerie as they loom above.

Catelyn should be rejoicing. Her daughter will be returned to her on this morning. Lannister forces began retreating at dawn and a small brigade of soldiers will be escorting Sansa to Riverrun.

She is the ceasefire.

The war has found finality in her eldest daughter’s homecoming. Accords have been signed on both parties, yet the bannermen await commands for battle. They are prepared to wage war for their king once more. Nothing is settled while the Northern armies linger this close South.

The war is not finished until her family is safe inside the walls of Winterfell once more.

Catelyn should be thanking the gods. She should be thanking her son for orchestrating Sansa’s recovery. Yet all she feels is dread and an overwhelming sense of foreboding. She has dreamed this day for many moons, imagined clutching her second child’s head and cradling it to her chest, feeling the warmth of Sansa against her body as she had that last day in Winterfell. Catelyn always woke up with a hollow ache in her belly, a stale taste in her mouth, and tears upon her cheeks.

They had first been tears of relief, happiness. But nothing was ever so precious in the daylight.

Lady Stark would not feel thankful, would not ease the rigid set of her shoulders or release the breath she had held since Ned—no. Not until Sansa was her child once more, no longer political fodder for the Lannisters. She would choke on baited breath before feeling joyous.

Greywind’s whines could be heard from the kennels. They were loud and full of yearning, a raw and brutal cry for liberty. When Cat shut her eyes she could feel her throat constrict in its own pitiful imitation of the wolf’s howls. She pretended it was her thrashing within a cage, scratching and biting at the wood, raving with a lust for freedom. The beast would wail in rage, in sadness, his desperation echoing tenfold across the courtyards.

Robb was starving the creature. Greywind had always loathed confinement, but Jeyne was fearful of him still and Robb hadn’t wanted to upset her. The girl was sweet tempered, young and gentle. She was not used to the North nor its people, let alone its monsters. She would come around, Robb had insisted.

But, keeping the direwolf at bay had cost them both. Robb was tense, restless, more quick to snap without the direwolf’s company. He would not admit it, least of all to his mother, but the king’s patience was beginning to weather. He was eager for home, for the comfort of Winterfell. He had endured the South for much too long, and while he shared Catelyn’s Tully look, he was a Stark. His place was in the North.

Cat’s fingers tightened inside her gloves as Greywind let go another distressed howl. Beside her Jeyne stiffened momentarily. On the other side of Jeyne, Robb’s jaw flexed.

“Release him,” Robb commanded. A Karstark soldier broke off from the guard with a nod. “He needs to see her.”

Mere seconds later, the hulking direwolf tore into the courtyard with a ferocity that unsettled even Catelyn. He came to a brief halt beside Robb, stones churning beneath his paws. Robb barely acknowledged the wolf, keeping his gaze on the horizon, through the gates his sister would be entering. The king’s hand shook as it pressed down into the wolf’s fur. Robb growled out a whisper “ _Find her._ ” Greywind bolted before the words could carry.

Bits of gravel spat behind the wolf’s feet as he lurched forward. The castle gates swallowed his form from sight, yet the beast’s whines of anticipation drifted through the morning gloom.

The courtyard waited in anxious silence. Men had been sent out before dawn to meet the Lannister vanguard to exchange Sansa safely from one side to the next.

They hear the guard long before seeing them. The ever-familiar sound of hooves beating upon dirt and stone makes Catelyn’s fingers twitch in their clasp at her front. The horses are raucous as they charge through Riverrun’s courtyard and Greywind’s snarls are audible as they quiver viciously in between the steeds’ distressed whickers. Horses do not take kindly to direwolves, yet the beast would not cease from their side.

Catelyn cannot help the choked noise plunging from her throat.

The daughter she has missed so desperately, so wretchedly, sits a mere twenty paces from her, the mount beneath her crying woefully in fear of the wolf at its side.

Catelyn’s gaze rakes across her child’s form, anything to prove she is safe, truly and unequivocally _home_. Catelyn knew the girl that left her at Winterfell would not be the same girl returning to her, yet the complete deconstruction of her daughter is shocking. That girl is not before her, instead the South has ripped that girl from her breast and replaced her with a woman, a changeling. The sweet, delicate youth she had raised and sent to the capital is nowhere to be found within the plains of Sansa’s cold, fine-boned face.

Sansa carries herself painfully erect in her seat, her shoulders taut and her back arched into her mare’s gait. The hair Cat loved to brush—so alike her own, is draped down Sansa’s back; a dash of furious color amidst the black of her travelling garb.

The horses settle and the vanguard dismounts, relieving their horses to the stable boys crawling out from the crowd stuffed around the perimeter of the courtyard. Sansa is assisted from her mount and nods to her guard, uttering her thanks with a small, earnest spread of her lips.

Greywind growls, snapping his jaws, as if to garner his charge’s attention, and urges his snout into the palm of Sansa’s hand. She peers down at the vast beast nearly to her ribs and rubs behind his ears promptly, soothing him before striding forward to greet her king.

Breath looms stagnant in Cat’s lungs as she watches Robb struggle to accept the new arrival. He is shocked, that much is plain, but he hides his emotions well. Sansa stands before Robb: her brother, her king. Greywind stands poised and complacent at her hip, and Sansa’s fingers burrow into his shackles. She stares at the Northern King with an expression Catelyn cannot read. She does not know her daughter as she once had. The South had changed her.

Her face was sharper, her cheekbones cut and the way she held her mouth was aristocratic, praising and condemning all at once. She did not have a smile for her elder brother, only an even, studious gaze that sliced pathways across his form. Calculating him: his potential, his purpose.

 _Too long_ , Cat mused. She’d been in the capital far too long. What had they done to make her this way?

Sansa does not bow immediately before Robb and his new queen, and holds his gaze. Emotion is a strain on his fastidiously crafted self-possession and his eyes falter in their resolve and his throat chokes on the practiced words.

Sansa curtsies slowly, measuredly, and her eyes bend upwards to Robb as she ascends. “My king,” she pronounces definitely. “My queen,” she adds softer, without sparing Jeyne a glance, “Mother.” Her lips are strict around the word, as if she is anxious of what voicing it would bring.

“ _Sansa_.”

It is all Robb can manage. The structured sentences he might have prepared have gotten lost somewhere between his chest and his mouth, caught in a frenzy between his heart and his throat.

Cat watches Sansa shiver beneath her cloak. She notices how her daughter’s eyes crumple shut, blocking out the emotions raging around her, beneath her skin. There is wrath there, Catelyn senses. It is knotted into the straight of her neck, forcing her head so high, and compelling her jaw to clench.

There is an acute twinge of pain located in the pit of Cat’s stomach, telling her _this is how it feels_.

 _This is how it feels to lose your children_.

Her children were right there before her, their physical forms proof of Eddard Stark’s life and legacy. She and her lord husband had created these precious things, she had grown and borne them inside her, in the heartland of the North, yet they had ceased to truly be hers. She might call them her children, but children they were not. Her son was a king, her daughter… she hardly knew. But the feeling of apprehension coupled with a severe longing to know her daughter once again was fierce within her.

“I have missed you, sister.”

Sansa opens her eyes, regaining her convictions. Her mouth is pursed, clamped in a pout that Cat can only consider as an attempt to restrain emotion. Her red tresses shake around her as she nods, her chin inching down from its noble perch in the air.

She steps forward into Robb and is swallowed by the furs wrapped around him as he envelops her.

**Author's Note:**

> Might be a part 2 to this, I'm never sure with these things...
> 
> I guess I just love bitter!Sansa. (I'm never going to forgive Robb for not making that exchange. Forever pissed.)
> 
> Title from the song "The Water" by Johnny Flynn.
> 
> Hope it was decent? :)


End file.
